So God pointed out to me that a report was recently issued about a study of teenagers and sex. I only read an article that talked about the report and not the report itself, so I can’t say much about the actual study. The soundbite that the article focused on is that, apparently, more teenagers of average intelligence have had sex than either smarter or dumber teens.

God wanted to know what I thought about it. My first thought was that it seemed at odds with the old Kornbluth story, “The Marching Morons,” but then, given that that story is fiction, I suppose it doesn’t matter much if it’s at odds with reality. And, of course, it was published almost sixty years ago, so it’s also possible teens may have changed their habits in the ensuing decades. Before I dismiss the story completely, let me give you a quick synopsis of the premise. I’ve been told that the premise of most Science Fiction stories can be boiled down to a form of one or more of three classic questions, “If only…,” “What if…,” and the one the Kornbluth story uses, “If this goes on…” The “if,” in this case, being “stupid people outbreed smart people.” It’s a question near and dear to many a welfare reformer, but that’s an issue for another day. So anyway, the idea presented in the story is that if stupid people keep outbreeding smart people, the average intelligence of humanity will drop, possibly to a point dangerously low.

Now the nitpickers out there will note that having sex is not the same thing as breeding and also that having had sex is not the same thing as having sex. To those people I say, yeah, you’re right, so what?

Anyway, before this post ends up going on too much longer than it already has, let me get back to teenage sex and what God wanted to know about it. (Boy, if that last sentence doesn’t get her to stop coming to see me, she really might have infinite patience.)

Again, anyway, I never really found a good way to express this, but I think God got what I was trying to get across: Today’s teenagers are the evolutionary result of trillions of genetic “experiments.” In a sense they’re the averaged result of all those successful sexual recombinations, so, on average, they’re predisposed to have sex; so maybe just being average makes them even more predisposed to having sex. It would be like the bell curve for intelligence is directly mapped to the bell curve for sexual proclivity.

And come to think of it, if a bell curve is steep enough it starts to look pretty phallic, so maybe…